FEWER GUNS, MORE GENOCIDE:

EUROPE IN THE TWENTIETH

CENTURY
David B. Kopel

This Article compares the relative dangers of excessive gun ownership and of
excessive gun control, based on the historical record of the twentieth century.
Part I presents homicide data for the United States and Europe during the
twentieth century. First, the Article considers gun death rates from ordinary
crimes—robberies, domestic violence, and so on. Based on certain assumptions that
bias the figure upward, if the U.S. gun homicide rate from ordinary crime had been
the same as Europe’s, there might have been three-quarters of a million fewer deaths
in America during the twentieth century. The figure is a data point for the dangers
of insufficient gun control.
Next, Part II presents data on mass murders perpetrated by governments, such
as the Hitler or Stalin regimes. In Europe in the twentieth century, states murdered
about 87.1 million people. Globally, governments murdered well over 200 million
people. The figure does not include combat deaths from wars. As will be detailed, the
death toll of all the people killed in battle in the twentieth century is much smaller
than the number of noncombatants killed by governments—such as the Jews
murdered by Hitler, or the Ukrainians murdered by Stalin. The mass murder by
government figures are, arguably, data points for the dangers of excessive gun
control.
Part III shows that totalitarian governments are the most likely to perpetrate
mass murder. Part IV argues against the complacent belief that any nation, including
the United States, is immune from the dangers of being taken over by a murderous
government. The historical record shows that risks are very broad.
The record also shows that governments intent on mass murder prioritize victim
disarmament. Such governments consider victim armament to be a serious
impediment to mass murder and to the government itself, as described in Parts V
and VI.
Finally, Part VII consider the efficacy of citizen arms against mass murdering
governments. Citizen arms are most effective as deterrents. If a regime does initiate
mass murder, rebellions seeking regime change usually fail. However, even without
changing the regime, the historical record shows that armed resistance can
accomplish a great deal, including the saving of many lives.

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 I. EXCESS FIREARMS HOMICIDES IN THE UNITED STATES IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

If U.S. gun homicide rates were as low as European homicide rates in the
twentieth century, how many lives might have been saved? The largest global dataset
for firearms homicide was published by the Journal of the American Medical
Association (JAMA) in 2018. 1 The relevant data are online in supplemental eTable9.
In 1990, which was a very high year for firearms homicide (and for all crime) in the
United States, the age-adjusted firearms homicide rate was 5.57 per 100,000
population (i.e., 557 firearms homicides per 10 million Americans). 2 The rate in
Western Europe was 0.53; in Eastern Europe, it was 1.31. 3 The European average is
0.92. The difference between the European rate of 0.92 and the American rate of 5.57
is 4.65. In other words, there were about 465 more firearms murders per 10 million
people in the United States than in Europe. The U.S. population in 1990 was nearly
249 million. Multiplying 24.9 (population in millions) by 465 (excess U.S. deaths)
yields 11,785. This is the excess of U.S. firearms homicides in 1990 due to the higher
firearms homicide rate in the United States.
Perform the same calculation for every year of the twentieth century, covering the
years 1901 to 2000, and using the rate of 465 excess firearms homicides per 10 million
U.S. population. 4
Over the course of the century, the United States had 745,162 more firearms
homicides than if the United States had the European rate of firearms homicides.
Assume that every excess American gun homicide would not have been a homicide
if the United States had adopted European-style gun control. That is, assume that
other lethal means would not have been substituted for firearms. Do not consider the
American gun homicides that are justifiable self-defense. Do not consider data about
how often nonfatal defensive uses of firearms prevent homicides or other crimes.
With the above assumptions, the failure of the United States to adopt European
gun control was responsible for almost three-quarters of a million excess deaths in
the United States in the twentieth century.

II. HOMICIDES BY EUROPEAN AND OTHER GOVERNMENTS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURy

1 M. Naghavi et al., Global Mortality from Firearms, 1990-2016, 320 JAMA 792 (2018).
This Article is based on a section of online chapter 14 of NICHOLAS J. JOHNSON, DAVID B. KOPEL,
GEORGE A. MOCSARY, AND E. GREGORY WALLACE, FIREARMS LAW AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT:
REGULATION, RIGHTS, AND POLICY (2d ed. 2020).
2 Naghavi et al., supra.
3 Id.
4 Of course, it would be ideal if the data started in 1901, rather than in 1990. By extrapolating from

the 1990 U.S. vs. Europe homicide differential, this Article is biased toward a larger gap than might
be found if precise year-by-year comparisons were available for the entire century, if such data were
available.
For simplicity, the calculations assume a straight linear increase for U.S. population between one
decennial census and the next.

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

Seven hundred and forty-five thousand is a very large number. It is, however, a
much smaller number, by more than two orders of magnitude, than the number of
Europeans killed by their governments in the twentieth century. International
homicide statistics usually only count murders by individuals or small groups. A
serial killer may murder two dozen people over several years. A mass shooter may
murder dozens at once. Murderers who use explosives or arson sometimes kill even
more. Even in the aggregate, individuals or small groups perpetrate vastly less
homicide than is perpetrated by criminal governments.
Government is a means to organize large numbers of people for collective action.
Such actions can be benign or malign. When murder is the objective, a well-organized
government can murder many more people than can murderously inclined
individuals who lack massive resources. Murder statistics that do not count murder
by government are missing most of the murders.
A comprehensive quantitative analyses of murder by government in the twentieth
century was published in 1994, by the late University of Hawaii political science
professor Rudolph J. Rummel. It covered the 15 most lethal regimes from 1900 to
1987. 5 Rummel had already written a trilogy covering each of the century’s three
deadliest regimes: Communist China, the Soviet Union, and National Socialist
Germany. 6 Each of the books in the trilogy contains detailed tables and data sources.
Data sources for the fourth through fifteenth deadliest regimes are provided in his
book Statistics of Democide. 7
The Statistics book also provides data sources and murder estimates for all other
mass killings by other governments from 1900 to 1987, as well as Rummel’s
regression analysis of what factors are associated with democide. Much of Rummel’s
work, including the data, is available on his University of Hawaii website, Power
Kills. Professor Rummel analyzed the causes of mass murder by government in all
his books and synthesized and summarized the causes in Power Kills: Democracy as
a Method of Nonviolence (2017) (1997). 8 His argument that public safety, prosperity,
and peace thrive best under democratic governments is elaborated in The Blue Book
of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War. 9
Not all of mass murders by government are “genocide” in the narrowest legal
sense. At the insistence of the Soviet Union, the Convention on the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1949) does not cover mass killings of economic
classes, political dissenters, and so on. Rather, the Genocide Convention addresses
only “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical,
racial or religious group, as such.” 10 Accordingly, Professor Rummel coined the word
“democide” to denote all mass murder by government, regardless of whether the

5 R.J. RUMMEL, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER SINCE 1900 (2017) (1994).
6 R.J. RUMMEL, CHINA’S BLOODY CENTURY: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER SINCE 1900 (2017) (1991);
R.J. RUMMEL, LETHAL POLITICS: SOVIET GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER SINCE 1917 (1990); R.J.
RUMMEL, DEMOCIDE: NAZI GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER (1991).
7 R.J. RUMMEL, STATISTICS OF DEMOCIDE: GENOCIDE AND MASS MURDER SINCE 1900 (1998).
8 R.J. RUMMEL, POWER KILLS: DEMOCRACY AS A METHOD OF NONVIOLENCE (2017) (1997).
9 R.J. RUMMEL, THE BLUE BOOK OF FREEDOM: ENDING FAMINE, POVERTY, DEMOCIDE, AND WAR (2006).
10 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide art. 2 (1949).

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victims were selected for ethnicity, politics, economics, or other reasons. 11 This Article
uses “democide” and “mass murder” as equivalent terms. 12
Professor Rummel does not include battle deaths in his democide total. He does
include military killings in violation of the 1977, 1949, and prior Geneva Conventions
on the laws of war. These killings include “the intentional bombing of a hospital,
shooting of captured POWs, using civilians for target practice, shelling a refugee
column, indiscriminate bombing of a village, and the like.” 13 Civilian deaths that
occur as collateral damage to attacks on legitimate military targets, such as bombing
a village “beneath which have been built enemy bunkers,” is not a violation of the
laws of war, and is not included in Rummel’s definition of democide. The same is true
for bombings that are aimed at a military target, but which hit a school or hospital
because of navigation errors. 14
Capital punishment with due process is not democide per se. “All extrajudicial or
summary executions comprise democide. Even judicial executions may be democide,
as in the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s. Judicial executions for ‘crimes’
internationally considered trivial or noncapital—as of peasants picking up grain at
the edge of a collective’s fields, or a worker telling an antigovernment joke,” are
democide. 15
For each nation, Professor Rummel describes the various sources that have
estimated particular killings. He then offers his own “prudent or conservative mid-
range estimate, which is based on my reading of the events involved, the nature of
the different estimates, and the estimates of professionals who have long studied the
country or government involved.” 16 He cautions that his estimates should “be viewed
as rough approximations — as suggestive of an order of magnitude.” He expects that
future scholars might arrive at different estimates, based on further research. 17
Tables 1 through 3, infra present some of Rummel’s data for democides involving
particular nations. Table 1 lists the 15 deadliest regimes of the century, each of which
is covered by a chapter of Death by Government. Table 2 covers some major European

11 “Democide” is narrower than “genocide,” in that the former includes only killing, whereas the latter
can include intentional destruction of a group by other means, such as forbidding the practice of the
group’s religion, rape by out-group members for the purpose of preventing reproduction within the
group, deporting group members from their homeland so that they dispersed and will be less likely to
marry and reproduce with each other, and so on.
12 Rummel’s definitions are as follows: “Genocide: among other things, the killing of people by a

government because of their indelible group membership (race, ethnicity, religion, language).
Politicide: the murder of any person or people by a government because of their politics or for political
purposes. Mass Murder: the indiscriminate killing of any person or people by a government. Democide:
The murder of any person or people by a government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.”
RUMMEL, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, supra, at 31. This Article, however, uses “mass killing” or “mass
murder” as equivalents for Rummel’s neologism, “democide.”
13 RUMMEL, POWER KILLS, supra, at 98.
14 RUMMEL, DEATH BY GOVERNMENT, supra, at 37-38.
15 Id. at 41.
16 Id. at xix.
17 Id. at xvii.

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

democides that were not large enough to be listed in the global top-15. Table 3 lists
some other 1900-87 democides on other continents.
The data cover only 1900-87. “This means that post-1987 democides by Iraq, Iran,
Burundi, Serbian and Bosnian Serbs, Bosnia, Croatia, Sudan, Somalia, the Khmer
Rouge guerrillas, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and others have not been included.” 18
Likewise not covered is the 1994 Rwandan democide. Of course, twenty-first-century
genocides are not covered. 19

TABLE 1
Mega-Murders—Over 1 Million Victims

Regime Years
Democide Summary
(000,000s)
Dekamurders (over 10 million victims)
People’s 1949-87 87.6 Mao et al. communist regime.
Public of Does not include 3.5 million murders by
China Chinese communists during the 1927-49
civil war.
Union of 1917-87 61.9 Communist regime. Includes 54.8 million
Soviet within the Soviet Union, plus 6.9 million
Socialist in areas conquered by the USSR. Josef
Republics Stalin’s rule (1929-53) accounts for 43
million. On an annualized basis, the pre-
Stalin regime founded by Lenin was more
murderous than the post-Stalin one.
Germany 1933-45 20.9 National Socialist German Workers (a/k/a
Nazi) Party.
Includes Hitler regime’s murders
throughout occupied Europe. Does not
include WWII battle deaths.
China 1928-49 10.1 Kuomintang party.

Megamurders (over 1 million victims)

Japan 1936-45 6.0 Military dictatorship.
Principally, war crimes perpetrated by the
Japanese army against civilians in
occupied nations, such as China or the
Philippines.
China 1923-49 3.5 Communist revolutionary army before
victory in 1949.
Cambodia 1975-79 1.5 Khmer Rouge communist regime.

18 Id. at xxi.
19 For current nations experiencing or at high risk of genocide, see the Genocide Watch website.

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 Per capita, the largest democide against a
domestic population. Includes murders of
ethnic minorities, intellectuals, and
dissidents, plus deaths from slave labor.
Turkey 1909-18 1.9 Young Turks regime.
Military dictatorship killings of Armenians
and other Christians.
Vietnam 1945-87 1.7 Communist regime.
Includes 1.1 million in Vietnam and 0.6
million in Laos and Cambodia. Does not
include battle deaths.
Poland 1945-48 1.6 Communist regime, post-WWII. Ethnic
cleansing of German population,
including in former German areas given
to Poland after the war. Deaths mainly
from subhuman conditions of deportation.
Pakistan 1970-71 1.5 Islamist military dictatorship.
A 267-day military attack by West Pakistan
on East Pakistan (which is now the
independent nation of Bangladesh). The
attacks were ended by Indian military
intervention. The figure does not include
battle deaths.
Yugoslavia 1944-63 1.1 Josip Broz Tito communist dictatorship.
Mass killings of ethnic groups and non-
communists in 1944-46, plus deaths in
slave labor camps through 1963.

Suspected megamurders (data are less certain, so estimates are rougher)

North Korea 1948-87 1.7 Sung family’s communist absolute
monarchy. Includes killings of prisoners
of war and civilian South Koreans during
the Korean War (1950-53).
Mexico 1900-20 1.4 Porfiro Díaz authoritarian regime till 1911;
revolutionary regimes and warlords
thereafter.
Deaths of Indians and peons on slave labor
haciendas, plus massacres of civilians
and conscription into slave labor by
various forces in the civil wars of 1911-20.
Russia 1900-17 1.1 Czarist regime.
Includes about 0.5 million from Russian
Empire Armenian irregulars
slaughtering Kurds in Turkey in WWI, in

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

reprisal for genocide of Armenians in

Turkey. Most of the rest from deaths of
prisoners of war in WWI. Some from
Jewish pogroms.
Total: 203.5 million

TABLE 2
Next-Largest European Domestic Mass Murders

Regime Years Democide (0s) Summary

Albania 1944-87 100,000 Communist.
Ultra-totalitarian regime of Enver
Hoxha.
Balkan 1912-13 10,000 Targeted by various governments.
Christians
Bulgaria 1944-87 222,000 Communist.
Czechoslovakia 1945-48 197,000 Coalition government including
democrats and communists.
Primarily reprisals and ethnic
cleansing of German-speaking
population.
East Germany 1945-87 70,000 Communist.
Hungary 1919-44 138,000 Authoritarian.
Includes 79,000 in Yugoslavia in areas
temporarily annexed by Hungary in
WWII.
Rumania 1941-87 919,000 Fascist then communist after 1944.
Spain 1936-75 452,000 Fascist Francisco Franco dictatorship.
Mutual democide of 202,000 by Fascists
and Republicans during Civil War.
250,000 by Franco thereafter.
Total: 2,108,000

TABLE 3
Selected Centi-Kilomurders (over 100,000)

Regime Years Democide Summary

Afghanistan 1978-87 483,000 Does not include battle deaths. Includes
democides by pre-1979 regime, by the regime
installed in 1979 by Soviet coup, by Soviet
Union, and by other forces.

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 Angola 1975-87 125,000 By communist regime following independence
from Portugal.
Burundi 1964-87 175,000 Tutsis vs. Hutus.
China 1917-49 910,000 Warlords.
Independent warlord regimes not under the
control of the Republic of China or of the
communist revolutionaries. 20
Ethiopia 1941-74 148,000 Haile Selassie monarchy.

Ethiopia 1974-87 725,000 Communist.

Guatemala 1956-87 122,000 Military.
Indonesia 1965-66 509,000 Killings of communists by the military, the
select militia, and others following a failed
communist coup attempt.
Indonesia 1965-87 729,000 Against East Timor secessionists.
Iraq 1968-87 187,000 Ba’ath party.
Mongolia 1916-87 100,000 Communist.
Mozambique 1975-87 323,000 198,000 by communist regime after 1975
independence from Portugal. Remainder by
opposition RENAMO forces (Resistência
Nacional Moçambicana).
Nigeria 1967-70 777,000 By government and Biafran forces during
Biafra’s failed war of independence.
Sudan 1956-87 627,000 Islamist military dictatorship.
Against various ethnic or racial minorities.
Turkey 1919-23 878,000 Atatürk regime.
Post-WWI attacks on Armenians and other
minorities.
Uganda 1971-79 300,000 Idi Amin military regime. Mainly against
minority tribes and Ugandans of Asian
descent.
Uganda 1979-87 255,000 Post-Amin regimes.
Total: 7,373,000

Sources: Except as noted below, the figures in the above tables are from R.J. Rummel, Death by
Government: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (2017) (1994) and R.J. Rummel, Statistics of
Democide: Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1900 (1998). The data are also on Professor Rummel’s
University of Hawaii website, Power Kills, which in some cases adjusts the estimates slightly.
The figures differ from Rummel for two nations. For Cambodia, Rummel estimated 2 million
deaths. Later research suggests 1.5 million. See BEN KIERNAN, THE POL POT REGIME: RACE, POWER,
AND GENOCIDE IN CAMBODIA UNDER THE KHMER ROUGE, 1975-79, at 456-65 (3d ed. 2008). The
Communist China total is detailed in David B. Kopel, The Party Commands the Gun: Mao Zedong’s
Arms Policies and Mass Killing, in online chapter 14 of NICHOLAS J. JOHNSON, DAVID B. KOPEL,

20Estimate from Rummel, Power Kills; higher than the estimate in his earlier book China’s Bloody
Century.

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

GEORGE A. MOCSARY, AND E. GREGORY WALLACE, FIREARMS LAW AND THE SECOND AMENDMENT:
REGULATION, RIGHTS, AND POLICY (2d ed. 2020).

The figure of 87.1 million Europeans mass-murdered by government in the

twentieth century is follows: All the Turkish democide is omitted from the European
total. Although a small part of Turkey is in Europe, and some of the Turkish genocide
was perpetrated there, including against the Greek population, most of the Turkish
mass murder was perpetrated against Armenians and other Christians in Asian
Turkey.
The communist regime in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics murdered about
5.6 million Eastern Europeans. The rest of its mass murders were within the USSR.
As of 1940, the population of the Soviet Union was 194 million. Of that total, about
25.2 million lived in “republics” in Asia (Uzbek, Kazakh, Georgian, Azerbaijan,
Georgian, Kirghiz, Tadzhik, Armenian, and Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republics). The
Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic was by far the largest in area and
population (110 million as of 1940), and spanned Europe and Asia. Based on the
common figure that about three-quarters of the Russian SFSR population is in
Europe, about 27.5 million of the Russian SFSR population was Asian. So of the
USSR’s 194 million population, about 52.7 million was Asian. Therefore, about 73
percent of the USSR population was European. Accordingly, of the 56.3 million Soviet
murders within the USSR, 73 percent are assigned to Europe. The Soviet European
democide is thus 41.1 million internally plus 5.6 million in Eastern Europe. Of the
Russian Czarist regime’s 1.1 murders in 1900-17, half a million were in Asian Turkey
with the remainder in Europe.
The total European democide is: USSR 61.9 million + Russian Czars .6 million +
Nazis 20.9 million + Poland post-WWII ethnic cleansing 1.6 million + other lesser
European democides (Table 2) 2.1 million = 87.1 million. The figure does not include
the mass murder of about 8,000 Bosnians by the Serbian government in the early
1990s.
The European twentieth-century democide of 87.1 million is over a hundred times
larger than the highest possible estimate of American twentieth-century excess gun
homicides of 745,000. At the least, the data indicate that over the long run, one’s risk
of being murdered is much lower in the United States than in Europe. It is not
surprising that migration between the two has always been very heavily in one
direction!
I am alive to write this essay because my Jewish German and Lithuanian
ancestors migrated to the United States in the nineteenth century. By moving to the
United States, they increased their risk of being shot by an individual criminal and
drastically reduced their risk of being murdered by criminal governments. The risks
did, in fact, materialize in Germany under the Nazis and the communists, and in
Lithuania under the Czars, the Nazis, and the communists. Because governments
are so much more effective at killing than are individual criminals (even the
aggregate of all individual criminals), the United States was much safer than Europe
in the twentieth century.

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 As noted above, the democide figures do not include battle deaths. The toll of battle
deaths worldwide from 1900 to 1987 was about 35.6 million. As Rummel shows,
democracies almost never start wars with each other. Conversely, the less democratic
a regime, the greater the foreign violence, although individual exceptions can be
found. 21 The same conditions that gravely increase the risk of mass murder of
civilians—namely, nondemocratic regimes—also gravely increase the risk of wars
and ensuing combat deaths.

III. THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FREEDOM AND DEMOCIDE

The best means to reduce the risk of democide is not to have a totalitarian
government. And, especially, not to have a communist government. As the data above
indicate, communist regimes are responsible for the very large majority of democide
in the twentieth century. The record of communism is detailed in The Black Book of
Communism. 22 As the next chart, by Rummel, illustrates, mass murder by
government is concentrated in the least democratic, most totalitarian nations.

Source: RUMMEL, STATISTICS OF DEMOCIDE, at 379 fig. 17.3.

As Rummel’s data show, the less free the government, the more likely it is to
perpetrate domestic democide. Totalitarian regimes perpetrate by far the most
democide, authoritarian regimes less so, and democratic ones least of all. 23 The very

21 RUMMEL, POWER KILLS, supra, at 59-80.

22 STÉPHANE COURTOIS, NICOLAS WERTH, JEAN-LOUIS PANNÉ ET AL., THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM:
CRIMES, TERROR, REPRESSION (Jonathan Murphy & Mark Kramer trans., Harv. Univ. Pr. 1999)
(France, 1991) (examination of communism in many nations, which special attention to the Soviet
Union, which was the foundation and model of other communist states)
23 RUMMEL, POWER KILLS, supra, at 91-98.

10

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

strong relationship between total regime power and domestic democide is not
changed by other variables such as diversity, culture, or society. 24

Source: Rummel, Statistics of Democide, at 381 fig. 17.5.

No democratic government has committed democide against an enfranchised

population. 25 As long as true elections are allowed, governments do not mass murder
voters.
The democide total in Table 1 indicated about 203.5 million democides from the
15 regimes that killed over a million each. The other democides listed in Tables 2 and
3 bring the global total to around 213 million. This compares to a total of 36.5 million
battle deaths in the entire world for the entire period. According to a poster that
debuted in 1966, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” This is
certainly true. According to the data presented here, murderous governments are six
times deadlier than war, making them very dangerous indeed. The data further
indicate that just about the only means of avoiding the risk of high-volume murder
by government is to live in a democracy.

IV. IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE

If it is expected that a particular government will always be free, then there would
be no need in the particular nation for citizen arms to deter or resist democide within
that nation. Free governments could enact any sort of gun control without worrying
that citizens might need guns to resist a future government that was trying to kill
them en masse.

24 RUMMEL, STATISTICS OF DEMOCIDE, supra, at 419.

25 Rudolph J. Rummel, Democracy, Power, Genocide and Mass Murder, 39 J. CONFLICT RESOL. 3 (1995).

11

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 But what if one’s predictions about the future are wrong? What if the good
government that one hoped would endure forever is taken over by totalitarians? This
is what happened in Germany. 26
In 1928, the democratic government of the Weimar Republic was concerned about
political street violence, perpetrated mainly by Nazi 27 and communist gangs. The
democratic legislature passed a law requiring a license to acquire a firearm or
ammunition. Further legislation authorized the states to impose retroactive
registration of all firearms.
At the time, some persons in the Weimar government had worried about the
dangers of registration lists falling into the hands of extremists. For example, if Nazis
or communists obtained the registration list for a town, they would know which
homes to burglarize to steal guns. Both groups had an established record of criminal
violence, including by armed gangs using illegally obtained guns.
In January 1933, after winning a plurality in a free election, Adolf Hitler was
lawfully appointed Chancellor of Germany. Not only the registration lists, but the
government itself fell into the hands of extremists. Almost immediately upon seizing
power, the Nazis began using the registration lists to seize guns, knives, and other
arms from members of other political parties, especially the Social Democrats, and
from Jews. 28
The Nazi policy over the next five years was “forcing into line”—bringing all
elements of civil society under party control. For example, independent gun or
shooting sports clubs were outlawed. Instead, clubs were to be registered with the
state and ruled by a Nazi political officer. Many clubs disbanded instead.
The Weimar gun control laws worked well for the Nazis, and so they were not
revised until March 1938. Although the 1938 law was presented as a liberalization,
in practice it further narrowed lawful ownership to only the Nazis and their
politically reliable supporters. In October 1938, arms registration lists were used to
complete the disarmament of the Jews, including even knives. Shortly thereafter, on
November 9-10, 1938, the Nazis unleashed Kristallnacht—government-orchestrated
mob violence against the Jews. 29
Something similar happened in France. Founded in 1871, the French Third
Republic was the glory of Western civilization. In 1936, Prime Minister Pierre Laval
led enactment of a gun registration law, which exempted some sporting long guns. In
May-June 1940, France was conquered by Nazi Germany, and the French gun
registration lists fell into Nazi hands. Laval, meanwhile, had turned a traitor, and

26STEPHEN P. HALBROOK, GUN CONTROL IN THE THIRD REICH: DISARMING THE JEWS AND “ENEMIES OF
THE STATE” (2014).
27 “Nazi” was a shorthand for the party’s formal name, Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei
(NSDAP)—National Socialist German Workers Party.
28 See, e.g., Permission to Possess Arms Withdrawn from Breslau Jews, N.Y. Times, Apr. 23, 1933, at

E1.
29 Kristallnacht is literally translated as “crystal night,” but often referred to as the “night of broken

glass.” The attacks were led by the Nazi Party’s paramilitary force, the SA (Sturmabteilung, lit. “Storm
detachment”; often called “brownshirts”). Many civilians participated.

12

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

maneuvered himself into becoming the second in command of Vichy—a fascist rump
state in southeastern France. 30
A prudent constitutional order aims to reduce the risk of tyranny. Tyranny
prevention mechanisms include regular elections, military subordination to civilian
government, restraints on executive power, free press, an independent judiciary, and
guarantees of personal freedoms. Such constitutional protections are often effective.
But not always. Europe is the birthplace of democracy in a formal sense, in the
city-states of ancient Greece. Yet in the twentieth century, almost all European
nations were conquered by Germany, the USSR/Russia, or both, or were ruled for
some time point by local dictatorships friendly with Hitler, Stalin, or the Czars. On
the European continent, Sweden and Switzerland are the only exceptions. 31
The list of nations to have both (1) maintained independence for the entire time
since 1900 and (2) maintained free government during that time is short. There are
no such nations in Asia, Africa, South America, or Central America. The full list is:
Australia, Canada, Iceland, Sweden, Switzerland, New Zealand, the United
Kingdom, and the United States—that is, 8 nations out of the 196 nations in the
world. 32
Over a century, the odds are low that a nation will enjoy independent and free
government for the entire time. Considering free government during the time after a
particular nation became independent in the twentieth century, there are several

30 See STEPHEN P. HALBROOK, GUN CONTROL IN NAZI OCCUPIED-FRANCE: TYRANNY AND RESISTANCE
(2018); cf. WILLIAM SHIRER, THE COLLAPSE OF THE THIRD REPUBLIC: AN INQUIRY INTO THE FALL OF
FRANCE IN 1940 (1969) (tracing the collapse to the moral exhaustion of the French people, and to the
torpor and incompetence of successive French governments).
31 As a neutral in World War II, Sweden freely traded with the Axis, providing the essential iron ore

for the Axis war machine. There was no Axis military benefit from invading Sweden. Unlike Norway,
Sweden has no Atlantic ports from which Nazi submarines could harass British shipping.
Switzerland also conducted business, primarily banking, with both the Axis and Allies. One reason
Germany did not invade this relatively small nation was Switzerland’s militia system. With a gun in
nearly every home on Switzerland’s difficult terrain, the cost to the German military of taking and
holding the country would have been excessive.
Finland was part of Czarist Russia until Czar Nicholas II was overthrown in 1917. Thereafter,
Finland has maintained its sovereignty and freedom. In 1939-40, the Finns beat back an attempted
conquest by Stalin’s Red Army, although Finland eventually did have to cede substantial territory to
the Soviet Union. See generally VESA NENYE, PETER MUNTER & TONI WIRTANEN, FINLAND AT WAR: THE
WINTER WAR 1939-40 (2018).
Two European microstates maintained self-government throughout the twentieth century.
Liechtenstein is a tiny principality between Austria and Switzerland; it was left alone by the Nazis
and the Soviets. The Holy See (a/k/a Vatican City) comprises a few blocks within Rome. Pursuant to
the 1929 Lateran Pacts between the Holy See and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, the Italian government
recognized the political independence of Vatican City. During World II, Mussolini attempted to coerce
the Vatican but did not invade Vatican City. Meanwhile, Pope Pius XXIII used his independence to
organize an anti-Nazi network of priests in Germany, to transmit German military secrets to the
Allies, and to support plots to assassinate Hitler. See MARK RIEBLING, CHURCH OF SPIES: THE POPE’S
SECRET WAR AGAINST HITLER (2015).
32 Counting Taiwan, which has been independent of China since 1949, but over which China continues

to make claims. Also counting Palestine, which the United Nations treats at a non-member observer
state.

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additional nations that have maintained free post-colonial government. The largest
is Israel, which won independence in 1948. There are also some islands in the
Caribbean and the Pacific that have had free governments throughout their
independence.
The majority of the nations that have maintained independence and freedom are
part of the Anglosphere. The last proto-totalitarian ruler of England was King James
II, who was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. H. Within the United
Kingdom today, there are worrisome signs. One of the two major political parties was
recently led by Jeremy Corbyn, a long-time supporter of Soviet totalitarianism and of
Hamas and other similar entities devoted to exterminating Jews. A polity that is well
vaccinated against supporters of mass murder would never elevate such a person to
major party leadership.
Only a foolish version of American exceptionalism would imagine that the United
States has been granted some sort of permanent immunity from the dangers of
totalitarianism. “It can’t happen here,” people have often told themselves. Yet it did
happen almost everywhere in Europe, including in democratic, economically
advanced, and socially progressive nations such as Germany. The American Founders
were acutely concerned about the dangers of American tyranny, and the Constitution
was their best effort to prevent it. It has worked fairly well so far, but constitutions
have force only so long as they are cherished in the hearts and minds of the people.
Today in America, as in the 1930s, many persons are openly hostile to the
Constitution. Political fights concentrate on a President who will rule by decree.
Although there are no Hitlerist professors in American higher education, there are
many Marxists. As applied, the difference between Hitlerism and Marxism is slight—
other than the higher murder count of the latter. 33
As detailed by the Canary Mission, Jew-hating student leaders are common on
American college campuses. Like their national socialist German ancestors of the
1920s, they use violence and intimidation to suppress speech in favor of Jews or by
Jews.
Today, millions of Americans believe that the current President is like Adolf
Hitler. Some Americans said the same about previous Presidents. Even if one
dismisses such rhetoric as fervid partisanship, there are worrisome trends that
began well before January 2017 and have grown worse since then: disrespect for the
rule of law; hostility to constitutional restraints on power; congressional abdication
of responsibility to govern, ceding decisions to a hyperexecutive; growing hostility
toward freedom of speech and religion; growing tolerance for political riots and
violence against people based on political opinions; acceptance of anti-Semites and
other haters as legitimate political actors and their election to high offices. E pluribus
unum is giving way to division between warring social and cultural tribes. Such ills
can be found in many contemporary democracies.
Persons of any political persuasion can easily point to political opponents who
embrace malignity, hatred, and authoritarianism. The fingerpointing is accurate. The

33Cf. ARTHUR M. SCHLESINGER, JR., THE VITAL CENTER (1948) (observing that the communist far left
and the fascist far right are the same in practice).

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

problem is not just one side of the political spectrum; civil society as whole is
deteriorating. 34 The people of Rome had an outstanding republic that had endured
for centuries, and then they lost it. 35
While historians may always debate about why the Roman Republic fell, the
historical fact is that it was established in 509 B.C. and breathed its last gasp in 27
B.C., after a long period of decline. The fall of a republic hundreds of years old, holding
immense territory and global power, should caution Americans who fantasize that a
republic established in 1776 is guaranteed perpetual existence.
No one knows the future of the United States. Over past decades, the party in
power has alternated, but the overall trend has been centralization of executive
power. Where today’s hyperpartisan centralization will lead in a decade or a half-
century is unknown. Perhaps the constitutional order will prevent the worst from
happening. Perhaps not. Germany in 1900 was a progressive democracy and one of
the most tolerant places in the world for Jews; in any country, things can change a
lot in a few decades.

V. ARMS MONOPOLIES PROMOTE KILLING WITH ARMS, AND KILLING BY OTHER MEANS

Democide is not always directly perpetrated with firearms. It is possible to commit

mass murder with machetes, as in the Hutu genocide of 800,000 Tutsis in Rwanda in
1994. It is likewise possible to perpetrate mass murder with advanced technology, as
in the gas chambers of the Nazi extermination camps. Or a government can kill
millions by deliberately causing a famine, as Stalin did in Ukraine in the 1930s. 36
Even so, the direct toll of government mass murder by firearms is enormous. For
example, Nazi genocide of Jews and Gypsies (Roma) was initially carried out by mass
shootings. As soon as the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941,
special SS units called Einsatzgruppen were deployed for mass killings. 37 All the Jews
or Gypsies in a town would be assembled and marched out of town. Then they would
all be shot at once. 38 Within a year, the three thousand Einsatzgruppen, aided by
several thousand helpers from the German police and military, had murdered

34 See, e.g., JONAH GOLDBERG, THE SUICIDE OF THE WEST: HOW THE REBIRTH OF TRIBALISM, POPULISM,
NATIONALISM, AND IDENTITY POLITICS IS DESTROYING AMERICAN DEMOCRACY (2018).
35 EDWARD J. WATTS, MORTAL REPUBLIC: HOW ROME FELL INTO TYRANNY (2018) (centralization,

inequality, venal politicians, public’s neglect in protecting republican institutions); MIKE DUNCAN, THE
STORM BEFORE THE STORM: THE BEGINNING OF THE END OF THE ROMAN REPUBLIC (2018) (covering 146
B.C. to 78 B.C.; breakdown of the “unwritten rules, traditions, and mutual expectations collectively
known as mos maiorum, which means ‘the way of the elders’”).
36 See ROBERT CONQUEST, THE HARVEST OF SORROW: SOVIET COLLECTIVIZATION AND THE TERROR-

FAMINE (1986).
37 SS was short for Schutzstaffel (Protection Squadron). The SS included élite military units, but it

was better known as Hitler’s secret police, displacing the SA from its previous spot as key enforcer of
Hitlerism. Einsatzgruppen means “task force.”
38 YEHUDA BAUER, JEWISH RESISTANCE IN THE UKRAINE AND BELARUS DURING THE HOLOCAUST, IN

JEWISH RESISTANCE AGAINST THE NAZIS 485-93 (Patrick Henry ed. 2014).

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roughly one million people, concentrating on small towns in formerly Soviet
territory. 39
Because of the psychological damage to the members of the Einsatzgruppen, the
Nazis attempted to replace mass shootings with mobile gas vans. 40 But herding
people into the gas vans required even closer contact with the victims than did mass
shooting. So the Nazis invented extermination camps with huge gas chambers, which
were more efficient at mass killing, and which created a larger physical (and,
consequently, psychological) distance between the murderers and their victims.
Possession of arms by victims is a serious nuisance to totalitarian police, such as
the Nazi SS or the Soviet NKVD and KGB. If frontline forces of totalitarianism can
get shot for doing their jobs, the result is not necessarily the overthrow of the
totalitarian regime. But necessarily, the possibility of being shot encourages caution
and circumspection. When the political police do not have an arms monopoly, their
efficiency is reduced. The more secret police who end up dead or wounded, the harder
it is to recruit replacements. It is harder to round up people for shipment to slave
labor camps or gas chambers if the intended deportees will shoot some of the secret
police who are coming to take them to the train station.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the Russian author of the most influential exposé of the
communist slave labor camps under Lenin and Stalin, recalled his and his fellow
prisoners’ feelings:

And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things
have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to
make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and
had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests,
as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire
city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at
every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but
had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the
downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers,
pokers, or whatever else was at hand? ... The Organs [of the state] would
very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and,
notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have
ground to a halt! If ... if ... We didn’t love freedom enough. And even
more—we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and
simply deserved everything that happened afterward. 41

It is no surprise that people in extermination camps, slave labor camps, and other
persecution camps are not allowed to be armed. During the Holocaust, the Sobibor

39 HILLARY EARL, THE NUREMBERG SS-EINSATZGRUPPEN TRIAL, 1945-1958, at 4-8 (2009); REUBEN
AINSZTEIN, JEWISH RESISTANCE IN NAZI-OCCUPIED EASTERN EUROPE 222-25 (1974)
40
EARL, supra, at 7.
41
1-2 ALEKSANDR I. SOLZHENITSYN, THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO 1918-1956: AN EXPERIMENT IN LITERARY
INVESTIGATION 13 n.5 (Thomas P. Whitney trans. 1973) (brackets added, ellipses in original).

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

and Treblinka extermination camps were permanently shut down by prisoner revolts,
when the prisoners managed to steal some weapons from the guards, and then use
those weapons to take some more. Few prisoners survived the revolts, but they were
all going to die anyway; their heroism saved many by putting the death camps out of
business permanently. 42
Statistically speaking, mass shootings occur predominantly in gun-free zones—
that is, places where the population has been disarmed. Hitler’s Einsatzgruppen shot
a million, and Mao’s 1949-51 Great Terror shot 1.5 to 2 million more. Even one of
these examples shows that mass shootings by government far outnumber mass
shootings by individuals. Successful societies suppress shootings by individual
psychopaths and prevent psychopaths from obtaining government power. As the
history of the twentieth century indicates, this is easier said than done.
Whatever the means, murder is most frequent when governments have arms and
victims do not. Guns are frequently used to coerce the conditions for mass murder by
other means. For example, after the Khmer Rouge communist regime took over
Cambodia in 1975, the cities were depopulated as Cambodians were marched at
gunpoint to rural slave labor camps. There, they were forced to work at gunpoint.
Many Cambodians were shot, but many more were worked to death in the camps or
died of starvation. Armed guards patrolled in search of Cambodians who were trying
to flee, such as by escaping to Thailand. 43
Similarly, in the Ukrainian famine created by Stalin, the people being starved to
death had to be stopped from fleeing to areas where food was available. “Under the
direction of the OGPU, militsiia [Stalin’s select militia] were deployed to liquidate
kulaks [peasants who owned land] and quell opposition from other rebellious
peasants during the collectivization of agriculture. And when the collectivization
drive led to a mass exodus out of the countryside, the militsiia were assigned
responsibility for enforcing a rigid internal passport and registration system to
deprive the peasantry of geographical mobility.” 44 The same occurred in communist
China.

VI. THE PERPETRATORS’ VIEWPOINTS IN TYRANNY AND MASS MURDER

Most people have never plotted to become a national tyrant, and so they have not
evaluated strategy from a dictator’s perspective. But consider persons who have. In
1923, Adolf Hitler attempted to lead a coup to take over the German state of Bavaria
and from there, the entire nation. The coup failed and Hitler and his co-conspirators
were put on trial. Thanks to widespread public support, they received light sentences.

42
DAVID B. KOPEL, THE MORALITY OF SELF-DEFENSE AND MILITARY ACTION: THE JUDEO-CHRISTIAN
PERSPECTIVE 108-11 (2017).
43
RUMMEL, POWER KILLS, supra, at 195-96, 201.
44 ELIZABETH J. PERRY, PATROLLING THE REVOLUTION: WORKER MILITIAS, CITIZENSHIP, AND THE

MODERN CHINESE STATE 323 (2007). The OGPU were the communist secret police. Formally, Joint
State Political Directorate under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (Объединённое
государственное политическое управление при СНК СССР). Later reincorporated as the NKVD
(People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs) and still later the KGB (Committee for State Security).

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Hitler’s closing speech to the trial court explained that he was born to be a dictator,
and, no matter what, he would never stop trying: “My opinion is that a bird sings
because it is a bird.... The man who is born to be a dictator is not compelled, but wills;
he is not driven forward but drives himself…. The man who feels compelled to govern
a people has no right to wait until they summon him. It is his duty to step forward.” 45
While serving several months in prison in 1924, Hitler wrote a book of political
theory, Mein Kampf (My Struggle), which frankly set forth his ideas and plans,
including totalitarian rule and elimination of the Jews. Having learned from his 1923
failure, Hitler no longer attempted to destroy German democracy by force; instead,
he decided to destroy democracy from within, by participating in the political process.
In less than a decade, he succeeded. Notwithstanding criticism of him by Germany’s
free press, he won a plurality in the 1933 election, and was appointed Chancellor,
under the mistaken belief that other people in the government could control him. By
1942, his empire stretched from France’s Atlantic Coast to deep inside Russia.
In creating what he called “the New Order” in his empire, Hitler explained the
necessity of disarmament:

The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the
subjugated races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who
have allowed their subjugated races to carry arms have prepared their
own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the
supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of
any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police. 46

Tyrants past and present are diverse, found on every continent, and comprising
all races and many different ethnic groups. Their ideology might be communist,
fascist, extremist religious, or absolute monarchist. Or they might have no ideology
at all. Despite the diversity, mass murderers and other tyrants are united by many
common practices, all of which were implemented by Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, the
Pol Pot and many other democidal regimes. They do not allow freedom of the press.
They attempt to bring religion under state control. Courts are not independent. And
these governments attempt to acquire a monopoly of force. This was true, for example,
in Darfur, Sudan, in the twenty-first century; in Indonesia’s ethnic cleansing of East
Timor in the 1970s; in Srebenica, Bosnia, in the 1990s; in Kenya and Uganda from
the 1960s onward; in Ethiopia against the Anuak in the twenty-first century; and on
the Pacific Island of Bougainville. Disarmament was also the condition precedent for
the mass murders of Jews by Nazis, of Armenians by Turks, and of Chinese by Mao.

45
JOHN DORNBERG, MUNICH 1923: THE STORY OF HITLER’S FIRST GRAB FOR POWER 336 (1982).
46HITLER’S TABLE TALK, 1941-1944 (H.R. Trevor-Roper ed., Gerhard L. Weinberg transl., 2d ed. 2007)
321 (statement from between February and September 1942). Hitler’s concern about native police was
well founded. Because Denmark surrendered almost immediately when Germany attacked it, the
nation was not put under direct military rule. Instead, it was, for a while, treated as a friendly
“protectorate” of Nazi Germany. Accordingly, the Danish police remained intact. The armed Danish
police were essential in the night-time boat lift of Denmark’s Jews in September 1943, to prevent the
Germans from seizing them and sending them to camps. KOPEL, MORALITY, supra, at 400-04.

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

As Ronald Reagan observed, “When dictators come to power, the first thing they
do is take away the people’s weapons. It makes it so much easier for the secret police
to operate, it makes it so much easier to force the will of the ruler upon the ruled.” 47
Thus, “[t]he gun has been called the great equalizer, meaning that a small person
with a gun is equal to a large person, but it is a great equalizer in another way, too.
It insures that the people are the equal of their government whenever that
government forgets that it is servant and not master of the governed.” 48 Search the
history of world from ancient times to the present, and one will not find tyrants who
deviated from the principle that the state must be stronger than the people.
A government that wants to be stronger than the people does not necessarily have
to prohibit all arms possession by its subjects. Hitler, Mussolini, and the Soviets
allowed the politically correct to possess sporting arms. A government may even
encourage armament by an allied group that is carrying out the government’s wishes.
For example, the Bashir dictatorship in Sudan ignored its own very severe gun
control laws, and fostered armament of the Arab Janjaweed, who were carrying out
the government’s plan to mass murder the African Dafari people in western Sudan. 49
Mao tried a similar policy during the Cultural Revolution in 1967-68, distributing
arms to his supporters on the far left in an effort to topple less-extremist communist
leaders.
Throughout human history, totalitarians have always disarmed their subjects.
This indicates that they considered widespread citizen armament to be a serious
danger to their regimes. Tyrants are evil but not stupid. A population that is well
armed is much harder to tyrannize and to kill en masse. Often, tyranny and arms
confiscation are imposed as soon as a regime seizes power—such as Mao in China in
1949, Castro in Cuba in 1959, or the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia in 1975. 50
In other nations, circumstances may require aspiring tyrants to move more
gradually in disarming the population and achieving absolute power. Venezuela
under Chávez and Maduro, and seventeenth-century Great Britain under Charles II
and James II are examples. The pattern is long-standing, observed by Aristotle and
Plato. 51
Although tyranny requires disarmament, disarmament does not always lead to
tyranny. There are many countries, such as today’s Luxembourg and the
Netherlands, where the population has been completely or almost completely
disarmed, and which are not tyrannies. In the short to medium run, a disarmed
nation can remain free. Whether that is so in the long run is more questionable,

47
Ronald Reagan, The Gun Owners’ Champion, GUNS & AMMO, Sept. 1975.
48
Id.
49
See David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen, Is Resisting Genocide a Human Right?, 81
NOTRE DAME L. REV. 1275 (2006).
50 For China, Kopel, The Party Commands the Gun, supra. For Cuba, see MIGUEL A. FARIA, AMERICA,

GUNS, AND FREEDOM: A JOURNEY INTO POLITICS AND THE PUBLIC HEALTH & GUN CONTROL MOVEMENTs
258-62, 267, 318-319 (2019); MIGUEL A. FARIA, CUBA IN REVOLUTION: ESCAPE FROM A LOST PARADISE
62-64, 415-18 (2002).
51
See ARISTOTLE, CONSTITUTION OF ATHENS, ch. XV (Thomas J. Dymes trans. 1891); PLATO, THE
REPUBLIc 353 (Book VIII) (Benjamin Jowett trans. 1928) (360 B.C.).

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according to the twentieth century’s political history. A person who removes the seat
belts and air bags from his or her automobile, and is conscientious in driving safely,
may never be impacted by the decision to remove last-resort safety equipment.
Likewise, a people that thinks that its nation is permanently immune to dictatorship
or conquest may remove its last-resort safety tools. History suggests that this would
be a gamble.

VII. EFFICACY OF CITIZEN ARMS IN PREVENTING MASS MURDER

A. Deterrence

Regime change is difficult once a tyrant has taken power. So as an anti-tyranny

tool, widespread citizen arms ownership works most effectively when it functions
as a deterrent. “The power of the people is not when they strike, but when they keep
in awe: it is when they can overthrow every thing, that they never need to move.” 52
In England, the very existence of a well-armed population during the reign of Henry
VIII deterred the despotically-inclined king from pushing things so far as to cause a
national uprising. During World War II, one reason there was no Holocaust in
Switzerland was because the Swiss people were heavily armed in a very well-
regulated militia. The very strong deterrent effect of armed victims is demonstrated
by the consistent behavior of tyrants in waiting to start mass murder until the victims
have been disarmed.
Incipient tyrants can sometimes solve the problem of deterrence by disarming the
public in gradual stages, so that people do not recognize tyranny until their chains
have been fettered. In England in the late seventeenth century, by the time it became
clear to many people that the Stuart kings intended to impose French-style
absolutism, the disarmament program was already well advanced. Whether the
English people could ever have liberated themselves is uncertain. They had the good
fortune to be saved in 1688 by an invasion from the Netherlands, which provided the
occasion for General John Churchill to lead half the British army in switching sides.
A key reason that the American Revolution began in April 1775, when the British
started forcible gun confiscation, was the American fear that waiting longer would
leave them disarmed and unable to resist. As Patrick Henry put it, “They tell us, sir,
that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we
be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally
disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house?” As a 1789
history of the American Revolution explained, Americans “commenced an opposition
to Great-Britain, and ultimately engaged in a defensive war, on speculation. They
were not so much moved by oppression actually felt, as by a conviction that a
foundation was laid, and a precedent about to be established for future oppressions.” 53

J.L. DE LOLME, THE CONSTITUTION OF ENGLAND 219 (John MacGregor ed., J. Cuthell 1853) (1775).
52

1 DAVID RAMSAY, A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION 105-06 (Lester H. Cohen ed., Liberty
53

Fund, 1990) (1789).

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 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

It is dangerous to start a revolution based on speculation. But as modern Venezuela

illustrates, it may also be dangerous not to.

B. Rebels Often Lose

Once a tyrant has established power, armed rebels will not necessarily be able to
change the regime. In Nazi Germany, Jews constituted less than 1 percent of the
population. Even if every Jew had been armed, they had no chance to remove the
Hitler regime unless a significant number of other Germans were willing to join them
in fighting. A mass German armed revolt against Hitler might have had a chance in
1933-34, but by 1936, it was too late. Hitler’s program of “forcing into line” had
brought almost all of civil society under the National Socialist jackboot.
History is full of examples of fighters who had a just cause and who were destroyed
by a superior army. The American revolutionaries started with an unusual
advantage: functioning state governments to organize and lead the rebels, and the
best-armed population in the world. Even so, the Revolution repeatedly came close to
being crushed.
Geography also helped the American rebels. Although the British could seize any
city they chose, the American interior was so vast that it could not be controlled by
Britain’s finite manpower. Rebels and defenders have better odds when the terrain is
favorable. During World War II, the marshes and forests of eastern Poland provided
hiding places for Jewish resistance fighters, whereas the plains of western Poland did
not. Likewise in Czechoslovakia, the mountainous regions of Slovakia helped make
possible a scale of resistance that was impossible in the plains and urban areas of the
Czech region, to the west.
Anti-tyranny rebels may fail without outside support. The American Revolution
depended on arms imports from the French, Dutch, and Spanish, and then on the
assistance of the French navy and army. Albania was the only nation in World War
II that expelled Italian and German occupiers without any need for Allied boots on
the ground, but even the Albanians needed arms supplies from the Allies.
Sometimes, democides are terminated because the democidal regime makes itself
so obnoxious to its neighbors and to other nations that they invade and depose the
regime. That is what happened to Idi Amin in Uganda, when his mass murders were
finally stopped by an invasion from Tanzania. 54 The same happened to the genocidal
Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; four years into the largest per capita democide in the
history of nations, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and dethroned the Khmer Rouge.
Counting on foreign rescue is foolish. The international community undertook
extensive handwringing after its failures to stop the mass murders in Rwanda and
Bosnia in the 1990s. Examining conditions since then, Professor Deborah Mayersen
considers whether there would be effective international action if a new genocide,
similar to the one in Cambodia, were found to be taking place at present. She

See David B. Kopel, Paul Gallant & Joanne D. Eisen, Human Rights and Gun Confiscation, 26
54

QUINNIPIAC L. REV. 383 (2008) (examining human rights abuses in gun control programs in Kenya,
Uganda, and South Africa).

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concludes that it is “highly likely” that there would be no effective international
response. 55
She was right, unfortunately. Chinese communist genocide against ethnic and
religious minorities in Xinjiang is taking place right now.
Historically, foreign military intervention has been the most common reason that
mass killings by government end, although the foreign interventions sometimes have
their own negative consequences. Surveying several nations, each with multiple
episodes of mass murder, scholars have pointed out the diversity of why mass killings
end. Sometimes, the regime stops because it has accomplished its objectives. Other
times, a regime may desist because of internal political or practical considerations:
military resources might be stretched too thin; the domestic political situation might
have changed. There is, as yet, no particular set of policy approaches by other nations,
such as sanctions, that appear to reliably lead to better outcomes. 56

C. Saving Lives Without Changing the Regime

The most effective means by which arms stop mass murder by government is
deterrence. But sometimes people find themselves in a position where the possibility
of deterrence is long past.
Even after genocides and other mass murders have already begun, when victims
obtain arms, they can save lives. Overthrowing a democidal tyranny is not the only
means to resist democide. As noted supra, the Nazi extermination camps of Sobibor
and Treblinka were shut down forever because Jewish prisoners stole guns from the
guards and led mass revolts. How many lives were saved because the revolts
disrupted the functioning of the Nazi machinery of death? Persons who use arms
against concentration camp guards or secret police are unlikely to survive, but they
may save others—sometimes many others.
Although rebels usually lose, on occasion they prevail even under desperate
circumstances. The Sudanese government’s genocide campaign in the Nuba
Mountains failed because well-trained defenders were better fighters than the
government’s militias. “Throughout the early 1990s, the Nuba SPLA [Sudan People's
Liberation Army] was cut off from the world. There was no resupply: they had no
vehicles, had no heavy weapons, and sometimes only had a handful of bullets each.
There was no humanitarian presence in the SPLA-held areas at all. There was no
news coverage. Facing collective annihilation and with nothing but themselves to rely
on, the Nubu people found the necessary determination and reserves of energy.”
Although they lost territory, “a mountainous base area remained impregnable.” 57
To the Sudanese example may be added several others, none of which had the
capacity to effectuate regime change:

55
Deborah Mayersen, “Never Again” or Again and Again, in GENOCIDE AND MASS ATROCITIES IN ASIA:
LEGACIES AND PREVENTION 190 (Deborah Mayersen & Annie Pohlman eds. 2013).
56
See Bridget Conley-Zilkic, Introduction, in HOW MASS ATROCITIES END: STUDIES FROM GUATEMALA,
BURUNDI, INDONESIA, THE SUDANS, BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA, AND IRAQ 1 (Bridget Conley-Zilkic ed.
2016).
57
Alex de Waal, Sudan: Patterns of Violence and Imperfect Endings, in id. at 121, 129-32.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3705684

 Fewer Guns, More Genocide

During World War I, the Ottoman Empire perpetrated genocide against

Armenians, Assyrians, and other Christians in Turkey. Armed resistance made it
possible for over 200,000 potential victims to escape to Russia. In fortified towns,
monasteries, and other defensible positions, the besieged Christians often were
starved out and killed, eventually. But sometimes the attackers retreated and a
village survived.
During World War II in Eastern Europe, a single Jewish partisan unit, the Bielski
Brothers, saved over a thousand Jews. Armed revolts in the cities, most famously the
Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, didn’t save the lives of the fighters. But they did show the
world that the Jews were not just victims; they were allies fighting in the common
cause against Hitler, and they deserved a share of the post-war settlement. There is
a direct line between the Warsaw revolt and the 1948 establishment of the State of
Israel—a state where the Jewish people are well-armed, and which in 1948 and
thereafter has defeated wars of Jewish extermination launched by nearby tyrants.
Tibet, after many years of self-government, was invaded and conquered by
Communist China in 1951. Armed resistance began almost immediately, and greatly
intensified after the communists announced a gun registration program, which was
universally understood as a prelude to confiscation. By mid-1958, most of the land of
Tibet had been liberated. Ultimately, China’s overwhelming numerical superiority
finally defeated the Tibetans. But in the meantime, 80,000 Tibetans escaped. Among
them was the Dalai Lama. As refugees in India, the Tibetans kept their religion and
culture alive, and have brought global attention to Tibet’s rights of self-government
against Chinese imperialism.
There is no certainty that armed resistance will defeat tyranny. There is certainty
that every mass-murdering tyrant fears armed victims and tries assiduously to
disarm those whom he intends later to subjugate and murder.

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Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3705684